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2/27/16

Third Place: "Goldcorp (GG) (G.to) files its year end financials".This is a subject covered by all the big wires and anal ysts in their companies, but lil' ol' IKN still managed to get plenty of hits by being quick off the mark and getting a post with the main points out there just minutes after the result NR had hit (and when NYSE after hours trading was still happening).

Second Place: "Place your bets for the next financing". My bet on MUX was a loser, my pal's bet on Kinross won him three beers. But one thing's for sure, there are going to be a whole bunch of new financings coming your way soon, large medium and small.

First Place: "It's a TKO: Taseko Mines's Ross Hallbauer goes full trainwreck on BNN" and this one deserves all the hits it got, though I'll admit I'm responsible for about half a dozen of them because I came back to this post and watched the trainwreck several extra times during the week. It's pretty hellish and I still can't get over that "while you were drinking eggnog..." stupidity. This guy earned $2.2m last year, by the way. Crazy world.

2/26/16

A two-year-old boy was kidnapped yesterday morning as a
Canadian-owned gold mine and its employees continue to be a target for
criminals in Guerrero.

Two
men and a woman were waiting outside the home of Gonzalo Godines García
in the Los Sauces neighborhood of Chilpancingo when he left for work at
the Goldcorp mine in Carrizalillo about 6:30am.

He was taken back
into his house at gunpoint where he was tied up with his wife. The
assailants then made off with the couple’s toddler son, Gonzalo Godines
Almazán, after his parents told them they could not meet their ransom
demand.

The kidnappers said they would return the child when the parents were able to make the payment.Continues here

But don't worry Canada, it's just one of those families of brown people, not like it's anything important right? And for sure the narco gangs won't use this method again, just a one-off, right?

Instead of putting the whole 35 minutes in front of you, let's get straight to the point. The second movement of the 7th is one of the better reasons to have had ears over the last 200 years, an affirmation of the tender painful complexities of the gift of conscious life.

Pollster CPI came outwith its latest voter intention poll for the Peru presidential election this morning and here's a chart with the main news:

Notes:

Keiko's "thirty plus" rating has been solid for months and months, she remains the clear leader but doesn't have a chance of winning in round one (April 10th).

Julio Guzmán is having a good week. His candidacy problems have been (all but) cleared up by the Peru electoral body and he's going to be a candidate, no throwing out at the last minute. Plus this poll, which puts him in a clear second place in front of "the dinosaurs".

César Acuña is down 5.3% from the last CPI poll of last month and is not having a good week. Not having a good year in fact. Good. Goodbye.

PPK has dropped away badly and Alan García's campaign has been a dead duck so far. Both surprises for your humble scribe, both part of Peru's shift away from The Usual Suspects and towards the new face of Guzmán.

The above covers 72.5% of voter intention. The rest is covered by the minor vote candidates (there are another 13 left in, intention for each starts at 4.1% and goes lower and lower) and the spoil ballot/don't know/no answer brigade.

Bottom line: It's going to be Guzmán versus Keiko in the second round run-off.

Unlike you, I am unimpressed with zinc's recent rise. Perhaps because I prefer to get my information about supply and demand for the metal from real data and stats, not zinc miner corporate presentations.

According to a reports, this is a win for Interpol as they saw his name come up on the flight from Portugal to Colombia (aren't computers useful?) and, having a Red Alert next to his name, the inter-cops were ready and waiting for him at Bogotás's El Dorado airport. He was promptly arrested and placed under the Interpol "controlled transit" protocol, which basically means he couldn't chekc into that five star hotel he had booked but has to stay as a guest of the police at the airport until he's put on a plane to Panamá. That should be today and when he arrives there, he gets arrested charged and remanded for the charges IKN told you about recently(all that selling property twice thing, gotta love the guy).

The main anal ysis will be on Sandstorm (SAND) (SSL.to). The legwork and numberwork is 90% done, the piece still needs to be written though. Basically I'm posting it here so that I don't talk myself out of publishing on the thing, whuss that I am.

That a successful academic, who built on his academic success by founding a university and making himself very rich indeed, was running for the Presidency of your country.

That he was running second in voter intention polls with just three months to go before the vote.

That suddenly people found out that his academic background was suspect, including an extremely strong case of plagiarism (we covered on IKN right here on January 27th) in his Master's degree.

That further investigation found evidence of plagiarism in his original bachelor's degree.

Then when it seemed it couldn't get any worse, he was found to have taken a academic-level book written by his university professor, changed the name of the author to his own, then passed it off as his own work for 15 years, including several new editions.

But when faced with that latest charge of intellectual theft, he held a press conference to show, via a document he waved to the press corps but didn't let them see close-up, he had permission to co-author the book from his professor, something that the professor strenuously denies.

And as cherry on top of the cake, when people started investigating the document used by the candidate as evidence he was in the right, they found that the professor's signature had been forged.

Sorry people, you up there don't have the monopoly on weird-ass election candidates, the 2016 Peru Presidential election is almost as much fun. The fall of César Acuña, up to this year one of Peru's apparent "success story" businesspeople, has been the classic cliché witnessing of the slow motion car wreck, the man's reputation is in ruins. And despite overwhelming evidence of his academic cheating he simply denies it all, for example the lifting of six pages of somebody else's work in his Master's thesis without any footnoting, credit or acknowledgement was called "an error, not plagiarism". Yesterday his deputy Vice-Presidential candidate resigned from the party ticket and the the Peruvian Electoral Ethics Committee described him as "unfit for office".

The good news in all this is that the Peruvian citizenry are not stupid and his voter intention has dropped off a cliff, from 15% and 12% to 6% as per last weekend. As for who will make the second round run-off, it's looking more and more like Keiko Fujimori versus the surprise outsider Julio Guzmán, who got the green light to remain in the race yesterday from the Peru election people after some iffy 2015 part paperwork was cleared up.

As subscribers of The IKN Weekly know, I've been selling a few positions into this pop and taking profits (they've also probably worked out I've been selling them a little early and leaving cash on the table for others, we'll deal with that Sunday ladies and gentlemen). I also have a couple of others I'd like to sell before the month is done. On the other hand that doesn't suddenly make me a gold bear; far from it, I see it going higher, we're talking portfolio management nothing else (aka "getting too cute").

To the point: There's a lot of script out there on gold all of a sudden, not just from the permabulls (hint for gold neophytes: Check to see if the person giving you "advice" today was telling us that the Gold Apple iWatch would change the worldwide supply/demand for the metal this time last year, it'll give you a clear inside as to their integrity and mental capacity). The crux of it all is "what price gold tomorrow" and as IKN likes to Keep It Simple Stupid, there's the call on the chart above. I'm not expecting a re-trace under U$1,200/oz, I think it's perfectly possible and if it happens, the sector's mining stocks will deflate for a while. So I'm raising a bit of cash.

2/24/16

Stop this, will you? "(Operating) cash flow before changes in (non-cash) working capital" or whatever other combo of words DOES NOT EXIST.

It

Does

Not

Exist

You're making it up as you go along. You cannot mine something out the ground and then pretend the rock is still there. That's the reason why there are GAAP rules and that's why your freakin' made-up terminology IS NOT PART OF GAAP. Those four are offenders in the last three days, by the way, there are many more. This bullcrap way of hiding losses needs to be stamped on right now, it's getting way too common and people with more money than sense* are going to start thinking it means something.

FWIW, among your humble scribe's little e-mail focus groupette (four of us) there was a winner. It wasn't me, obviously (I went for MUX and lost a beer). The dozen or so guesses received from others were all failures too. Hot damn the IKN Focus Group is strong.

Good to see so many of you coming on board the daily digest email service (all the previous day's IKN posts sent to you in a morning mailer, click here for the thingy) and joining the thousandshundredsdozens about seven people who get their dosage of this humble corner of cyberspace in an easily swallowed lump.

However a piece of admin advice is necessary, you need to open the auto-mail that Google/Feedburner sends you and click on the link, otherwise you remain unverified and the mailer doesn't get sent. Here's a screen shot of the last couple of days from the list of new names (names and company mail addresses deleted, for obvious reasons):

See what I mean? The auto-mail may get shuffled off to your spambox. If so, find it, open, click, have nice day.

You out there get to hear the haters pile on IKN for telling you the truth about Lithium X (LIX.v). It's a charge led by Tommy Humphreys, one of the "10 to 20" who now fears for his cheap scam payola in March.

Meanwhile, IKN gets to exchange with real Howe St. people, the ones who are capitalists through and through but aren't trying to rip off the retail investor public at any given opportunity (and believe me, sadly the good'uns are the exception not the rule). Here below are two mails between your humble scribe and Person X this morning, who cannot possibly be named but has forgotten more than you or I know about the Canadian mining scene.

First what I wrote to Person X as a reply (to a first mail that I won't show you, I have permission to publish just one of his):

Correct and correct.

I
fell out bigtime with Tim Oliver when he decided to join that scam,
told him in no uncertain words what I thought. So when he bailed I
didn't get to
hear from him firsthand (he's still mad at me, i don't care) but I know
second-hand that he saw for himself the scam and, to give him credit,
got out before his reputation was damaged. He can't make any public
comments (obviously) and i dunno what he did with
his options, but tail-between-legs exit, eso sin duda che.

It's a complete Vancouver Howe St BS special.

Now what Person X wrote back:

That’s
the problem though. LIX won’t die suddenly. I’ve seen the movie before.
The Giustra jet engine will suck in its followers into
the jet-intake, the street will eat Frank’s 2 cents of acb from his
shell for years to come. 10-20 people will make money on this, all
Frank’s inner circle.

There are so many other ways you the retail investment community get ripped off by these sharks with smiling faces, but it's a window on just one of the techniques. I'm not telling you to go long or short LIX.v, I'm telling you to avoid these scam plays like the plague, it's high time these rip-offs got ignored and just atrophy on their own. Do Not Feed The Animals.

PS: Even though he's pissed at me, I'm glad Tim Oliver is out of LIX. He's an honourable guy and did the right thing. Hopefully one day he'll speak to me again.

...Metanor is getting buy calls from people who aren't paid by the company to tout the stock (Caesar's Report, Jay Taylor, usual suspects).

...people are mailing IKN Nerve Centre to tell your humble scribe about their pet theories for silver and how there will be no slump after PDAC.

...Carl Icahn looks as though he has a clue about commodities companies.

...the market thinks Capstone won't go broke.*

PS: Consider this a stop-gap offering, I'm still distracted by things outside of work and don't really have much inspiration to post a whole bunch at the moment. Check back another day for the frivolity and invective and revealing market-moving exclusives and stuff. Your life doesn't revolve around this blog, neither does mine.

UPDATE: Reader 'ST' chirps in with...

It's so bullish out there in the miner's sector that people are buying B2Gold

2/22/16

That's the news this evening. And the Macri government now estimates it will need U$20Bn to cover all the payments they're going to make to the US Funds. Ex-FinMin under CFK, Axel Kicillof has already called this "negotiation" the scam of the century. Now we're starting to be drop-fed some hard numbers, it's difficult to deny that he has a point.

Leads: CIBC/RBC/Scotiabank 17.83% eachCo-Managers: TBD 46.51%Treasury Issuer: Pretium Resources Inc. (“Pretium” or the “Company”)Issue:Offering (the “Offering”) of approximately ● common shares (the “Common Shares”).Issue Price: U.S.$● per Common Share, which shall be determined by the Company and the Underwriters in connection with the marketing process.Amount: Approximately U.S.$120,000,000.Over-Allotment Option: The Company has granted the Underwriters an option, exercisable at the Issue Price for a period of 30 days following the closing of the Offering, to purchase up to an additional U.S.$10,000,000 of Common Shares to cover over-allotments, if any. Use of Proceeds:The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the Offering (i) to fund development of the Brucejack Project, (ii) for working capital during start-up and (iii) for general corporate purposes.Form of Offering:Offered by way of a shelf prospectus in all provinces of Canada, except Quebec, in the United States pursuant to the Multi-Jurisdictional Disclosure System, and internationally as expressly permitted by the Company.Listing: The existing common shares of Pretium are listed on the TSX and the NYSE under the symbol “PVG”.Eligibility: The Common Shares issued in this offering will be a qualified investment for RRSPs, RRIFs, DPSPs, RDSPs, RESPs and TFSA’s.Pricing Date: On or about February 23, 2016. Closing Date: On or about March 1, 2016.Comment: This is an overnight marketed offering for Common Shares in US$ priced in the context of the market (last trade: US$5.05).

While the Vancouver promotion community tries to sucker you all into LIX.v, we here at IKN concentrate on the real happenings in the growth world of Lithium. The following is a small segment from IKN354, out last night.

Not fake scams in Clayton Valley,
here’s where the real lithium action is and will happen. Since President
Bachelet announced a few weeks ago that lithium would become a strategic
mineral and subject to separate growth plans during her government, the
interest in the metal in Chile (and its continued stratospheric price rises on
the world market, with battery-grade Lithium Carbonate now apparently fetching
up to U$28,000/tonne) has gone mainstream.

Last week we had a new round of
news with, depending on which report you read (here are two as examples (16)
(17)), between six and nine foreign companies having already made formal
approaches to Chile’s Ministry of Energy and Mines as regards lithium
concessions, exploration, development and even production plans, with two of
those inquiries including full scale presentations on planned development and
production. The names of companies haven’t been officially released but
reporters have already identified a few of the companies looking to move into
the Chilean lithium sector and they’re some of the biggest in the world,
including South Korea’s POSCO, Australia’s Talison, Japanese lithium specialist
Li Energy and a company from the United States called Tesla, a name that’s
probably familiar to you already.

I’ve made this point before and I’ll make it
again, when it comes to lithium Chile is the number one world producer but more
importantly, when it comes to the growth potential of lithium production Chile
is also number one. It has the permitting procedure down pat, the
infrastructure is there, the country is very miner-friendly in both fiscal and
judicial terms and the scalability of its Li sector means it will ramp up
faster than any other region in the world (and that includes Clayton Valley, an
area play promotion scam par excellence).

Why insist with this chart? To put the spotlight on those blithering idiots out there who called silver to run further and higher than gold during this current rebound (and have done so since time immemorial). We're now at a GSR of 80.3 to 1 this morning, silver continues to lose relative value against gold and why on earth you guys bought up all those silver miners last week is beyond me, I can think of only two offhand that are truly profitable (and even they are priced very expensively).

The thing with the silver rah-rah brigade is their hypocrisy; you can't get them to shut up if their metal of desire pops a dollar but point out some simple facts, like supply (production was up YoY in 2015, not down) or the annoying little point about Ag being an industrial commodity metal first and foremost (oh they hate that one) and they'll start trolling you for being on the Goldman Sachs payroll or whatever.

Silver is the vehicle of investment preferred by stupid people. The end.

Could this be the worst performance ever by a mining company CEO on national TV? What was he thinking?

Answer: Honestly dunno MS, but if there is a worse one than this I want to see it. Ross Hallbauer, the pres/CEO of Taseko, was on Canada's biz teevee Friday lunchtime to answer questions about the proxy fight the company now faces. It starts gently enough (though from the getgo you can see he's ill at ease), because questions about the $26m spent by Taseko (and plenty of that on fees to parent company Hunter Dickinson) with nothing to show for their efforts are batted back with standard "corporate governance" and "board approval" answers. But then, at around 1:15, the interviewer asks him just how independent the board is when three of its members are also on the Hunter Dickinson board. From this point it goes downhill fast for Hallbauer, from ouch to aaargh and beyond embarrassing. With eggnog. A case study on how not to be a TV CEO, go see itall right here.

Your humble scribe and a couple of mailpals have been giving the whole Donald Trump thing a bit of back and forth via mails this morning, what with his South Carolina win last night. Here's one of the mails I wrote to them, it's making the blog after one of the mailpals suggested it could be fun to see on the blog.

I think on one
level Trump's campaign is clever. He (or his team) has identified that
there's been a big growth in GOP supporters who are 1) disenfranchised
with the whole political system and 2) are plug dumb stupid. So he
pitches to them, he gains their support with the most facile of slogans
("he's gonna make America great again because it says so on his baseball
cap"), keeps them amused and entertained with anti-system potshots that
fit his "You're Fired!" TV personality.

My
question: What happens in round 2 of the campaign, when he gets the GOP
nomination (which now seems likely) and is up against (probably)
Hillary? The classic move is towards the centre, to pick up the support
of the 4% or 5% of US citizens who swing the country either way in any
given election. He'll have the mouthbreathers sewn up and on his side by
then, he won't need to pander to them any longer, they've served his
Round One purpose. He'll be able to soundbite himself as more
intelligent, surprise people with his "depth of understanding on the
issues", all the racist sexist bigotry bile is filed away for another
day. He'll lull them to sleep, he's going to look least worst among
moderate GOPpers who couldn't possibly vote for him in the primaries but
just the thought of tactically voting a Clinton into office in order to
avoid a circus barker in the oval office brings them out in a cold
sweat.

And
Hillary, like her or not, has a whole trainload of baggage, is an easy
target on several fronts and isn't a person who the undecided will
happily float towards. She's the dream opposition for Trump, his
negative attacks will be an onslaught. And though I like Sanders and his
policies (you up there call him commie, he's classic centre-left no
more) he's doesn't have a chance. So how does DEM stop Trump? If Mikey B
runs independently he'll take more votes away from Hillary than The
Donald, he opens the door for Trump. So as far as I can see, the only
way is if Bloomberg gets the DEM nomination, or creates a
Bloomberg/Hillary ticket. Either that or it's Donald vs Hillary and I have no idea which way that one will go, it's a big risk scenario.

All
that's on one level, Trump's campaign has been, quite literally, a
revelation. But on the most important level this is craziness squared,
it's nuts, the most powerful country in the world is on course to put a
sociopath in charge! And I was worried about Sarah Palin being Veep
under McCain, seriously, this is the Doomsday Clock at a whole different
level. I too fear for the world, seriously.

UPDATE: Nice feedback from reader PB, here below. I'm fully aware that this whole "Trump Thing" must have been debated to death up there already and I know that it's extremely unlikely that I'm adding anything new to the chattersphere (and I'm certainly aware that my dos centavitos makes no difference whatsoever to the greater scheme of things). What I can tell you is that I haven't been following the debate, so when smarter people have done the legwork already it's only right that I point you their way. Thanks again, PB.

Third Place: "A quick thought on the gold/silver ratio".It really was nothing but a quick thought as well, but for some reason it took off and got far more hits than it deserved (even more than that "Tahoe/Lake Shore deal in trouble" post). I'll never cease to be mystified about what's popular and what's not on the interwebnetpipes.

Second Place: "PretiVm (PVG) (PVG.to) forgot to thank its ex-COO". There's something wrong at PVG and you don't need me to tell you that, just look at its share price underperformance through this current rally. Supposedly a full-on World Class project and with all the rah-rah backing you could wish for, it can't catch a bid in a bucket at the moment.

A sad fact: The serious side of the Canadian mining world is saying the same thing about this scam pump but they're all too chickenshit to say anything in public. It's pathetic how sycophantic kowtow merchants cheer on IKN and send in mails to say "oooh Otto you're absolutely right about LIX" but not one has the guts to stand up and speak truth to power, say what's blatantly obvious about LIX in public, preferring to hide behind your laptop screens and cower in your cubicles. You're all too worried about pissing off Big Frank (metaphorically speaking only, of course) and getting your career put on stall. How you dare accuse Giustra of doubletalk and sleight of hand when if given the same chance you'd do exactly the same is beyond me.

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